


Ian Hanert Is Not A Hero!

by Ham_Hocks



Category: Masks: A New Generation (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Masks, Mystery, Podcast, Superheroes, Teen Superheroes, Thriller, but also a story about finding yourself, if you're looking for a story that uses john denver as a plot device you've come to the right place, maybe the real mystery was the friends we made along the way, more lesbian domesticity than you can shake a stick at, sometimes a family is just four lesbians and the anxiety-ridden college student they've adopted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-04-06 08:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19059232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ham_Hocks/pseuds/Ham_Hocks
Summary: Four years after the event that led to the dissolution of The Young Vanguard, Ian Hanert (formerly known as The Getup Noise) is still trying to adjust to life as a civilian - he's finishing college, getting in touch with a former squadmate, and he even has a cat. But when you're an ex-superhero, civilian life doesn't always take, and Ian finds himself sought out by an aspiring superhero with a problem - someone wants her dead, and she needs his help to find out who.[This was a project for NaNoWriMo 2018, based on the Masks podcast hosted by Roll Out.]





	1. Maybe I'll Be Fine This Time

**Author's Note:**

> OF COURSE THERE'S A FOREWORD:
> 
> This is a love story. Technically, it's a couple love stories: one of them is between myself and my boyfriend. Another is between myself and the Masks podcast our characters were featured on. And then, there are the love stories that are actually in this text itself.
> 
> This is a story from a very liminal moment in our podcast--Pippa's player, Tristan, was flirting with a full heel turn for Pippa, and Evan had quietly confided to me that he was ready to retire Ian from the game. The character, he'd said, was too inconsistent, too far from what he wanted, and he could see no workable way to bring him back to where needed to be, because he had no idea where Ian should be in the first place. Combine that with a pause in our recording sessions spanning several months, and it really only compounded the angst over Ian's fate.
> 
> So, on November first, I got to writing. I told nobody about NaNoWriMo, in fear that I'd jinx it, but I began to unspool the idea that Evan had put down in front of me: what if Ian did retire? What if he did quietly hang up his ridiculous outfit, and go off to college? And because I needed to make the story as self-indulgent as possible to keep my interest going over 30 days and 60,000+ words, I turned it into a schlock-fest starring a kid working out his identity crisis under the loving semi-guidance of four lesbians (who are doing an okay job of holding it together). And on December 25th, I handed over the link to the google doc and corresponding Spotify playlist to Evan, and told him that, even though we were saying goodbye to Ian, he'd still remain a character that I was very fond of.
> 
> Well, I jinxed it; Evan figured out how to get Ian back on track, and he remains on The Young Vanguard's roster. Pippa did not ultimately fall prey to Nicoletta's clutches, and, as you'll see, Paige's final confrontation does not exactly go as laid out here. Truthfully, I'm a bit relieved. 
> 
> In this universe, Pippa remains evil; quietly lurking in the background for an eventual sequel. Beep Boop has retreated to god knows where, but in the instated canon here, she's still on the side of good. This is the Earth-2 of The Young Vanguard, a collection of people living out a what-if that became far more rewarding than I anticipated.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it.

 

The sky above The Getup Noise hung lower than it ought to have. This felt like a ceiling, like an inscrutable presence pushing down on him, closing over him like a bowl upended onto an insect. The sky was rust-red, and the air around him was dense with the acrid smell of burning metal.

What he remembered most, though, was the feeling of broken concrete under the soles of his boots. The unevenness of the terrain, the fact that he could never get his footing, that he always felt just off balance. He was standing on the broken remains of a building. He was panicking. Was he too late?

In front of him stood a woman--no, a girl. She wasn’t even sixteen years old, and she was moving forward at a limping slog. Her red hair was mattered to her forehead by blood, and she grimaced with each agonizing step she took forward. She was holding a body. Human, but broken. She was quiet. Her ears were still too big for her head, her eyes still round and wide and so cheerful. She had been so cheerful. There was blood crusted in her nose around the inside of her ears.

She looked up at him. Paige looked up at him helplessly, her arms quaking with the effort of carrying Diana’s body.

She opened her mouth.

She began screaming.

And then, he awoke.

 

_November. Horsehead Glen, Massachusetts._

Ian Hanert, now twenty-one years old, awoke with a great shiver in his bed in his rented studio apartment. That dream was a familiar one to him, and as he came to attention, he set aside the panic it always stirred in him in a practiced mental ritual. _Remember who you are, remember where you are, remember what you’re doing._

He wasn’t The Getup Noise anymore; he was just Ian Hanert. The interceding four years since he’d left The Young Vanguard had not done much for his posture, his attitude, or his work ethic, although he did have heavier bags under his eyes now, and he had somewhat grown into his ears. He was a college student who was majoring in music theory at Horsehead University. He had successfully shrunk his life down to fit in the small, brick-wall studio apartment he rented, and at the moment, he was shivering under his blankets. It was unseasonably cold, even by New England standards, when Ian’s alarm sounded. He awoke feeling frigidity in his nose and ears, and frost was creeping up the window like winter ivy. He grunted, pulled the covers over his head, and realized he had company under the blankets: Shrimp was curled at the small of his back, purring loudly.

The acquisition of Shrimp, Shrimpy, or Shrimp Toast (his Christian name) had been the most illegal thing Ian had done in the past four years. The cat had manifested itself on his ledge outside of his dormitory window one cold day, and Ian had panicked and let the cat in for fear of it freezing to death, which had manifested another bout of panic as he realized that he was breaking the rules by having a live animal in his dorm. By the time that had subsided, the cat had helped himself to Ian’s leftover Chinese food and settled in on his pillow, cementing their status as roommates. Shrimp was, at least, courteous –he had obligingly kept himself out of trouble while Ian was in campus housing, and could be counted on to curl up against and purr furiously at Ian if he felt overwhelmed, which had turned out to be a valuable service. When the chance came to move into an off-campus studio that didn’t much care about pets, Ian had jumped at it. Shrimp, truthfully, had been the biggest catalyst for self-improvement in Ian’s life, which Ian didn’t prefer to dwell on.

Now, however, Shrimp was under the blankets and showed no inclination of moving. Ian knew the problem – his studio was heated by an arthritic radiator that broke frequently, and it had already been groaning in protest of another cold night when he’d gone to sleep. The super would have to be called on his way to class, and until then, he’d have to hope there was enough hot water left in the tank to eke out a quick shower. He rose, shivered, pulled his ratty hoodie over his bony shoulders, and flicked the coffeemaker on. Shrimp remained under the blankets.

The shower was breathtakingly cold – Ian found himself backed against the wall for anything that did not involve rinsing the soap off of his body. He bundled himself in his towel and darted to the clothes rack that sat off in a corner of the apartment. On his way there, he caught a quick glimpse of himself in the mirror. In fiction, skinny people are sometimes diplomatically referred to as ‘slender,’ or ‘lithe.’ Ian, however, lacked the natural grace to be either of those things – his ropey muscles clung to his bones, and his skin was pallid from years of staying indoors and maintaining a diet that was light on any sort of nutritional virtue. Ian was, however you sliced it, just rail-thin. Skinny and tall, with a slouch that had defined his posture since he was prepubescent. Not especially superheroic, even when he had entertained that style of living. Good riddance.

He shook his head at his own reflection and dressed in layers – probably more than he’d need later, but there was still a damp chill that had embedded itself under his skin – and pulled a hat on over his wet black hair. In spite of the shower, he felt a deep tiredness that he knew would remain with him for the day. It wasn’t just tiredness; it was _weariness_. What he was weary of, per se, he didn’t know. He only knew that this sort of dragging exhaustion had followed him every day since he’d left for college. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped it black. When he filled Shrimp’s bowl, the lump under the covers only stirred briefly. As he continued to navigate the morning, Ian checked what time it was on his phone, and he realized that he’d received a barrage of text messages. He had been so wrapped up in the broken radiator and the business of getting ready that he hadn’t even noticed that his phone had been vibrating non-stop since he’d gotten out of the shower.

“Hi Ian! It’s Paige.” (Paige had been texting Ian on and off for five years and still began all of her messages this way.) “I moved to Waterloo with Anai a month ago, and I wanted to know if you wanted to come over for dinner Friday! Flashpoint and Windswept will be there too! Please let me know if you’re interested!”

And then, five minutes later, a single text had been sent from a different number. Ian knew who it was – she’d given him her number just before he’d left for school. “If you ever need advice, or you have a problem, or you just need someone to talk to, you call me,” Diana had said, and he knew she’d meant it. It had opened the door to a sort of vulnerability that Ian had immediately buried, and he’d never contacted her, but her number had stayed there, just in case. Now, he could see that she had taken the initiative. The message was simple, but blunt. “It would mean a lot to her if you came.”

Ian sighed, and set his phone down. There was something squirming around in his chest, some knot of emotions that mostly laid dormant in the four years since he’d left the Young Vanguard and gone off to college. It was not that he wanted to forget the Young Vanguard, to unmake his time there, to have just been Ian Hanert for that period of his life – it was that he simply no longer wanted anything to do with it. He wanted to neatly bundle all of it and place it in storage, where he would no longer have to confront it on a regular basis.

Suddenly, unbidden, he remembered: _Paige, stumbling out of the rubble, her heart glowing white under her skin. She was holding Diana in her arms, and she was bawling for help. Ian had realized, at that moment, how small she actually was, as she carried her mentor’s body from the wreckage. She was screaming. The air was hot in his nose and throat. He’d never seen so much blood._

The adrenaline that had accompanied that memory also gave him the jolt he needed to re-center himself. He was not in Halycon City anymore. He was in Horsehead Glen. He was Ian Hanert. He was a senior in college, he was studying music theory, and he wasn’t a superhero. Diana was alive, and Shrimp was now out from under the covers, kneading his paws on Ian’s leg. He then realized that he was doubled over on his bed.

“I’m okay,” he said to no one in particular, as Shrimp purred loudly. “I’m okay.”

The landlord. He needed to contact the landlord and get the radiator fixed.

 

* * *

 

 

It was a specific breath that called Windswept back to bed two or three hours after she rose for the day. That was her routine - wake before even the birds began calling, work for a few hours until the sunrise began to purple the horizon, and then slip back into bed. This morning, like every other, she returned to the warmth of the sheets and laid her head beside Diana's, resting her hand on the other woman's chest and feeling it rise and fall beneath her palm. But it was the breath she drew as she woke, that deep almost-gasp as her body remembered what it was like to be alive, that she waited for every morning. And this morning, as it had been with every morning for the past four years, Diana obliged her. Windswept watched patiently, almost fretfully, as Diana's eyes flickered open and she breathed again, pulling the other woman close and burying her nose in her hair.

"Hi," Diana said softly, her breath warm against Windswept’s scalp.

"Hi," Windswept murmured, tracing her fingertips over the edges of Diana's collarbone. The two of them laid there like that for a while, Windswept following Diana's breathing, and Diana's hand idly tracing its way down the other woman's body, but not yet asking for anything. There were things to do, of course. Reports to file, boxes to unpack, and furniture to assemble, but that was why she'd risen earlier, and then returned to the pullout couch they were currently sleeping on. This was perhaps the only piece of stillness she would tolerate.

Almost imperceptibly, Diana's hand shifted, and she brushed the tips of her fingers against Windswept's stomach, tracing the waistband of her leggings as she leaned forward and kissed the other woman's neck. Windswept felt gooseflesh spread down her arms. "Diana," she murmured softly.

"Mm?" Diana's hand had migrated under the waistband of her pants.

"We can't," Windswept whispered. "We're in the living room."

"We're under a blanket."

"Paige and Anai-"

"Won't be up for at least another hour." She softly kissed at the juncture of her neck and shoulder.

"They're in the next room."

"I can be quiet." And then, she nipped her earlobe. "Can you?"

And then, of course, fate interceded: “Good morning!” Paige crowed, booting the bedroom door open. Windswept felt Diana sputter in surprise as she jerked her hand out from between Windswept's legs.

“Told you,” Windswept said under her breath.

“Kid, it’s early,” Diana whined, rolling onto her back and giving a very convincing performance as a woman who had just been jolted out of sleep. “Go back to bed.”

“Early? It’s 8:30! We have stuff to do! Boxes to unpack! Breakfast to make!” Paige hopped onto the foot of the pullout couch, pulling her feet (she was wearing bunny slippers) under her, and her bushy red hair, regrown in the four years since it had been singed off, up into a ponytail. “Don’t you want to start the day off right? We could go for a jog!”

“Absolutely not,” Diana replied, covering her eyes with her forearm. “How ‘bout this? You can go for a jog, and I can go back to sleep. Anai, would you help me out here?” Windswept could see Anai lingering at the bedroom door, her muscular arms folded over her chest. “Tell Paige that normal people aren’t up at 8:30.”

“I have been awake and meditating for the past two and a half hours,” Anai replied.

“Great; you’re both weirdos.”

“And you can’t go back to sleep; we have to get ready for tomorrow night. I just texted Ian. Maybe he’ll come!”

“I know.” Diana sat up, her black hair still tousled from sleep and a half-smirk on her face. Even now, grumpy and half-asleep, she was still beautiful. Sometimes, when the light hit her right, Windswept could see age beginning to settle at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She wasn’t even forty yet, but her life she’d lived had been weighted.

Unbidden, Windswept remembered the long scar on her ribs, silver with age against her tan skin. She remembered daring to touch it once, and feeling Diana instinctively tense under her fingers. “It’s not yours to worry about,” she’d said. “Not yours to feel bad over, either.” Even now, after four years together, Diana sometimes had the feel of a town that had suffered a natural disaster, but had already rebuilt itself before Windswept had arrived on its borders. Once in a while, she still woke up from night terrors. Once in a while, there was still a faraway look that came into her eyes for half a second. There was negative space from something long gone, a void that had hardened into a cavern before Windswept had gotten there.

“Tell you what,” Diana said, stretching. “We’ve got enough to do that I don’t feel like making scrambled eggs. What do you say you two go on a run to that brunch place down the street? I think it’s called Yoke’s On You? My treat.”

“Oh, man. I could go for pancakes. Anai, do you want get pancakes with me?”

“I will go wherever you’d like,” Anai responded. Effusive as usual, Windswept thought. She had known Anai for four years now, and the only time the woman's stoicism wavered was in the face of Paige's goofy affection. Standing next to each other, Anai tall, lean and dark, and Paige short, stocky and freckled, they felt like complements. They fit together, Windswept thought approvingly.

“Then let’s go!” Paige launched herself off of the futon and dashed back into the bedroom. “What do you guys want?”

“Bacon, egg, and cheese with jalapenos,” Diana called back. There was a mischievous glint in her eye. “And a black coffee.”

“I’ll have egg whites and whole wheat toast,” Windswept replied. Somewhere between “egg whites” and “toast,” Paige bolted back out of the bedroom, fully dressed and practically glowing.

“We should be back in a few. I’ll text you if anything changes!”

“Good deal. My wallet’s on the counter. Be safe!” Diana called after Paige and Anai. Windswept watched as Diana sat, listening as Paige galumped downstairs and out the door. Only after the two girls materialized on the sidewalk did Diana roll over and pull Windswept back down to the mattress with her, her lips tracing her jawline.

“Diana.” Windswept gently brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Did you honestly send the kids out so we could get some privacy?”

“Yes.” Diana caught Windswept’s hand and gently kissed her fingers.

“They’re going to be back in ten minutes,” Windswept replied.

“No, they’re not. The reviews for that place are always complaining about the lines.” As if on cue, Diana’s phone vibrated as the screen flashed an incoming call from Paige. “Hello?” Diana answered, smirking.

“Diana,” Paige’s voice was glum. “Do you still want to get breakfast from this place? The line is really long.”

“Oh, no. I guess you hit the early-morning breakfast traffic.” Diana’s voice did not sound sincere. “Did they say how long the wait was for takeout?”

“Like, forty minutes? Is that okay?”

“Are you okay with it?”

“I’m fine! They’re letting us wait inside since it’s cold.”

“Okay, sounds good. Text me when you’re on your way back, okay?”

“Okay! Bye!”

Windswept watched as Diana set her phone on the windowsill and then shrugged at her. “If it makes you feel any better, I did really want to try the food.”

“You’re terrible.”

“I’m goal-oriented. Last I checked, you were into that.” Diana kissed her again, and this time, Windswept kissed back.

 

* * *

 

Horsehead University was a bit of a hike from Ian’s studio, but he felt like the cold air and the exercise would help him nudge his brain into functionality. Truth be told, he liked the walk, liked the little shops that lined main street and eventually gave way to suburbia, liked the fresh air and the smell of grass and fallen leaves. Since he’d come to Horsehead University, he’d become intimately familiar with every road and pathway around the school. He knew every jogger, every barking dog, every car with an opinionated bumper sticker. He was, for the first time in his life, part of a community. It begged the question of where he would find himself next May, when he presumably graduated. His stipend from his time at the Young Vanguard would pay his rent for however long he needed, but he was beginning to feel that he should move on after he got his diploma. After all, he’d made no friends in college, joined no clubs, and was close to none of his professors. Why bother? He’d leave soon enough, anyway. But to where?

Ian didn’t particularly like these questions nipping at his heels, and tried to focus. Midterms were coming up. (What would Windswept say when she saw him?) He needed to email a professor about one of his final projects. (How much had Paige grown up since she’d seen him?) Shrimpy needed cat litter. (Maybe he could apply to the graduate program?) And he needed to call the landlord. (Windswept, crouched over Diana’s unresponsive body, her hands shaking as she administered first aid.) And the landlord! The landlord! THE LANDLORD!

Ian arrived to campus having called the landlord.

Horsehead University itself had the exact feel of a small-town private liberal arts college: open pathways, pretty brick buildings, manicured hedges, and fountains and benches dotting the landscape. It was a quaint atmosphere that just invited some sort of calamity to jumble things up. Every student, it seemed, wore a scarf and carried a cup of coffee, and today, with the cold snap and the orange leaves shining against the brilliant blue sky, the atmosphere of collegiate endeavor was amplified tenfold. Ian hated it. He just wanted to get to class. But, as he made his way to the Humanities Studies building, something caught his ear.

A scream. Close. Panicked.

Ian wanted to ignore it. It wasn’t his business. It was broad daylight, mid-morning at a small college in an affluent town: nobody was getting jumped right now. There was no point in checking it out, he thought as he turned and ran in the direction of it. It was stupid, he thought, pushing through the crowd of fleeing students running in the opposite direction as him. What could happen that would trigger this kind of panic? Installation art?

He got his answer when he reached Vander Quad. Plodding through the grass was a gigantic clown, at least twelve feet tall, its red lipstick painted over a shark’s mouth. As it reached up to honk its nose, Ian could see that its hands had gnashing, tooth-lined mouths on their palms.

“Holy _shit_ ,” he remarked to no one in particular. The giant clown seemed to be making its way to the main section of campus, and was following one young man as he fled, his face white with panic. It was closing the gap between them very quickly. There were no cops, no Vanguard, nobody else to intervene. And yet, there he was.

“How do you even _get_ giant clowns on campus!?” He groused, bolting towards the young man. The clown was reaching down now, one hand/mouth aimed squarely for the man’s head. He wasn’t going to make it! _He wasn’t going to make it!_

Ian put everything he had into moving his legs and jumped, hooking an elbow around the kid’s arm and yanking him out of the path of the clown’s hand, sending them both to the ground. The kid’s books went flying. “Run!” He shouted, and the kid clamored to his feet, buttonhooked to the left and took off. The clown let out a wheezing laugh, and honked again.

“Oh, I don’t like that,” Ian grunted, climbing to his feet and clearing his throat. “Hey, Bozo! I didn’t know the circus was in town!”

The clown turned, looked down at him with a beady eye, and Ian saw a sudden human intelligence in its face. He suddenly felt extremely small and extremely mortal. Then, something even more peculiar happened: it shuddered and crumbled into dust, leaving Ian in the middle of a decidedly clown-free quad.

“What the fuck was that?” He asked. He felt his phone buzz in his back pocket, took it out, and looked at it: he’d received one of the campus-wide texts that got sent out whenever there was an emergency on campus. This one simply read, “DISTURBANCE REPORTED ON VANDER QUAD – CAMPUS PD ARE INVESTIGATING.” Ian scoffed, and shoved his phone back into his pocket. Ghost clowns aside, he had a class to get to. As he shouldered his bag and struck out back to Humanities, he replayed the encounter in his mind. _“I didn’t know the circus was in town?”_ He frowned, and shook his head. Surely he could do better than _that_.

Ian’s 11:15 Intro to Journalism was what he called a “fuck it” class – he’d taken it to get to full time status and qualify for grant money, it seated a hundred students easily, there was no attendance taken, and he didn’t need to pass it to graduate. Most of the time he was there, he was working on homework for other classes. Today, though, there was a hushed electricity in the students assembled. What had happened? What was that thing on the quad? Students were passing phones back and forth, comparing photos and video, and whispering excitedly. Ian settled back in his chair, still shell-shocked from the entire experience. Oh, sure, speculate on the giant shark-mouthed clown wandering around campus! It’s not like any of them had gotten close enough to see the gaps between its hand-teeth!

“Settle down,” the professor said, setting her bag on the podium. Professor Nije was a pleasant, no-nonsense woman who could effortlessly wrangle her students on days when there was a lot to talk about, and this certainly seemed to qualify. On cue, the class quieted and leaned forward in anticipation of what she was about to say. “So, did you guys see it?” She asked, her voice conspiratorial.

“It was a giant fuckin’ clown!” One boy volunteered.

“It came out of nowhere!” A second girl chimed in. “It was just there all of a sudden!”

“It had, like, three mouths!”

“It had spider legs!”

“It tried to take a guy’s head off!”

“Settle down!” Nije tapped her pencil on her podium. “Okay, I had interviewing techniques written down for today, but I can tell you guys don’t care about that right now. So, let’s see if we can make this a teachable moment. Of the class assembled right now, who actually saw it?”

Ian kept his hand down, but a few students raised theirs.

“Okay. Now, how did the rest of you find out about it?”

“Flashmessage,” a girl volunteered, raising her hand. “A bunch of people took video of it and sent it out.”

“Great. Who else?”

“Friendspace,” another student said. “It just, like, took over my feed.”

“Am I old? I just got a text message,” another student said to a smattering of laughter.

“Great. And what would we call all of these?” Nije asked, to which the class remained silent. “Primary…?”

“Sources,” the student chorused back.

“Great. So instead of keeping you in here, I want you to go read chapter five in your Core Journalism book, and then go out and find one person who saw what happened in the quad, and get their take on it. Remember the five W’s when you ask them, okay? I want you to write everything down, and have it ready to go on Monday.”

Ian jammed his notebook into his bag and slipped out the door before most of the students had left their seats. Find a primary source? Fine. He could sit down and write this out fifteen minutes before class on Monday and not feel any guilt over it. This was maybe the crummiest start to a Wednesday he’d ever gotten. And now, he had a five hour gap to fill before Advanced Composition. He’d probably spend most of those griping with the other members of that class as they congregated in the performing arts center.

But something was bothering him. Specifically, the clown. Something about it had been eerily familiar. Not its appearance, but how it moved, as if it had been superimposed on top of the living world. And it had simply crumbled to dust when it saw him. Why? Why had it vanished when he’d confronted it? There had been something that had flashed across its face when it had seen him. It had almost been a look of recognition.

And then, it had crumbled to dust. Away from the chaos of that moment, Ian realized that he knew what it was. He had been facing down a _construct_ in Vander Quad. Someone had made that thing, and then set it loose on a bunch of students. But who? And why?

A construct. He felt his stomach turn at the idea. He wanted, desperately, to not care. He wanted the sensation of caring about this to feel as foreign to him as breathing in water. But here he was, sitting on the lip of the humanities fountain, staring at the cobblestone walkway, feeling a deep, horrible concern blooming in his chest. This meant that there was someone on campus with superpowers. Someone who had set them loose on the students. Someone who had recognized him.

He was out of his depth. He wasn’t The Getup Noise anymore; he was just Ian Hanert. He was a college student who was majoring in music theory. This wasn’t his world anymore, and even if it had been, he had never been the one who specialized in constructs. But he knew someone who did. Someone who had always kept the lines of communication open, just in case.

Ian took out his cell phone, and pulled up Paige’s message. After a moment, he replied. _“Sounds good. Can I bring anything?”_

 

* * *

 

The morning passed with no further incident - by the time Paige and Anai returned home, more than an hour after they had set out, Diana was dressed and the sheets on the couch could have been tousled for any number of innocent reasons. Still, Windswept fretted about them being found out because Diana's swagger seemed even more pronounced, and Windswept had loudly shooed Paige away from the couch when she'd tried to sit down on the blankets. But as they all ate breakfast together, the four of them, Windswept felt some small granule of reassurance. Paige, Diana, and Anai felt like a team. That cohesion was going to be important, should their plans come to fruition.

And still, as Paige snuck forkfuls of Diana's eggs when she wasn't looking, as Diana and Anai traded combat stories, as Paige rested her head between Anai's shoulders and gazed off into the middle distance, she couldn't help but feel left out of the equation. Watching them talk and laugh so easily might as well have been like breathing underwater for her. She'd never understand how to do it, down to a genetic level.

Assembling furniture, though; that was something she could do. Aided by her super speed, Windswept put together four chairs, a dining room bistro set, two end tables, a coffee table, and had completely stocked the kitchen before it was one in the afternoon. She was, in fact, taking a five minute breather before launching herself into the window treatments when Paige poked her head out of the bathroom, her face alight.

"Ian's coming!"

Windswept choked on her apple juice.

"Ian's coming?" Diana asked, looking up from the accordioned directions on how to assemble a television console.

"He is! He just texted me! He wants to know if he can bring anything!" Paige skidded into the living room. "Guys, this is amazing. I haven't seen him in four years. I can't believe he's coming."

"It's sure amazing," Windswept said weakly, a sudden nervous coldness blooming in the pit of her stomach. "Not to interrupt, but I was about to go down to the corner store because we're out of water. I'll be back in a few minutes. Hydration is important." And she zipped out of the apartment - fast, but not fast enough to miss the glance Diana gave Paige.

It was Diana who caught up with her as she stood outside the building in the November cold, her thin arms trembling from something she didn't care to unpack. She didn't speak as the taller woman handed her her leather jacket, and she shouldered it. Diana's jacket smelled like smoke and the warm spice of her perfume. It was heady. She resisted the urge to bury her face in the collar.

"We have water in the fridge," Diana said, folding her arms over her chest.

"I'm fine," Windswept countered. "Just got taken off guard, that's all. I needed to get some air."

"Did you not expect to see him again?" Diana asked, shrugging. "I mean, he keeps in touch with Paige. Feels likely he'd show up at one point or another."

"It's not that." Windswept couldn't meet Diana's eyes. She felt ashamed for even needing to step away at all. "I said my goodbyes. I just feel like the book's been closed."

"You're not divorced, for chrissakes." Diana rolled her eyes. "You were his mentor. Look, maybe it'll be nice to see the kid. From what Paige tells me, he hasn't changed a bit."

Windswept was lost in thought: the last time she'd seen Ian. He had shaved his head bare, and he somehow looked smaller than her. She'd realized for the first time that he was skinny. He'd been diminished. She shook her head. "I hope not."

"Look." Diana wove an arm around Windswept's shoulders, and the other woman couldn't help but lean her head against her chest. "If you want, we can arrange for something to come up tomorrow night. You had to have a last-minute meeting with a city council member. A bad guy's on the loose. A goose got into the tower and you need to get it out. You don't have to be there."

"I'm not doing that."

"There's no shame in it."

"I'm not doing it because I shouldn't be worried about seeing him in the first place!" Windswept snapped, and immediately felt regret. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap."

"It's okay." Diana said. "Look, if you want to be here, I'll back you up. Paige will, too."

"I don't need a support system," Windswept said, irritation clear in her voice. "This isn't - this isn't a catastrophe. It's just a visit. That's all. I'm fine."

"If you say so." Diana shrugged. "I'm going to go back upstairs and try to figure out how to assemble a television stand. Let me know if you need more time. I'll whip up another errand you had to go on." She lifted Windswept's hand and kissed it. "It's just one night, for dinner. It's not going to become a thing, T. He’ll come, it'll be awkward, and then it'll be over."

"I hope." Windswept smiled weakly. "I'll be up soon."

"Okay."

 

* * *

  
  


Advanced Theory and Composition was a complete wash – the whole class was still buzzing about the incident earlier in the day, and Ian couldn’t focus his mind enough to care about how the progression of parallel fifths might affect the piece of music he was theoretically supposed to be writing. How could he care about that? And anyway, it wasn’t like he’d touched an instrument outside of the school’s practice pianos in the past four years. He’d tried, once: he’d downloaded a program to start stringing together music, but the happy little electronic chimes had caused his stomach to immediately sour. He’d uninstalled it, and never tried again.

The class ended at ten PM, and he quietly slipped away as he always did, hoofing it across the half-frozen campus to the coffee shop in the student union building, as was his Thursday night habit. He checked his phone: Paige had responded to his RSVP with a cascade of emojis. It might be nice to see her, he thought to himself as he approached the counter and ordered his usual (large coffee, black, five sugars). They’d never been particularly close, but she’d been the one member of the Young Vanguard who had kept in touch with him after he’d left, and he had secretly appreciated it.

“Ian?” Ian looked up at the barista, who was handing him his to-go cup. “You have an admirer.”

“Sorry?” Ian shuffled over to the counter.

“Someone asked me to write this on your cup for when you came in.” She shrugged. “I think she’s sweet on you.”

Ian looked at the cup, which had a message scrawled on it. “NICE MOVES TODAY. OLD ENGINEERING ARCH, 10:30 PM TONIGHT” He looked up at the barista. “Who asked you to do this? And when?”

The barista shrugged. “Hard to tell, honestly. She was wearing a hat and a scarf over her mouth, but she tipped me twenty bucks, so, you know. She came in earlier today.”

“Do you have a name? Did she, like, pay with a card or anything?”

“Ian, when a girl asks you out, the normal thing to do is say yes.” The barista smiled encouragingly. “She clearly likes you; she knew you’d be coming in today. Maybe you have a class together.”

“What time is it now?”

“10:15. If you hurry, you should be able to catch her.” The barista waggled her eyebrows.

“I’m not letting somebody ask me out by stalking me and then writing weird messages on my coffee cups!” Ian shouted as he bolted out the door. It couldn’t be a coincidence, right? It had to do with the clown. Who had seen him? And why were they being so cloak and dagger about the whole thing, especially when he had to get home to Shrimp? Old Engineering was on the other side of campus, and everything was stone quiet in the chill of the evening. The campus was almost completely desolate – all the kids who were hitting the bars had left, and everyone else was holed up inside, like sensible people.

The Old Engineering arch was really more like a tunnel – Old Engineering had an underpass that connected to the Chem building, which let students escape the elements when they needed to go between either structure. Kids sometimes went down there to smoke, but once winter neared, it should have been empty. It wasn’t. Ian could see a young man, kneeling on the concrete, his hands behind his head. He was staring at a human figure composed entirely of teeth, and he was shaking with fear.

“You took something that didn’t belong to you,” a female voice said. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Ian could see a hooded figure standing behind the young man. She looked small, no taller than Paige, and she was dressed all in black. “Didn’t you?”

“N-no,” the young man pleaded. “I didn’t—I didn’t take anything. I did—”

“A laptop. You stole a laptop out of your girlfriend’s dorm room.”

“No! I didn’t, I swear! I didn’t!”

“I have witnesses who watched you leave with it. You stole it.” The construct inched closer to the man, and as Ian watched, it extended a hand, and reached for his mouth.

“What do you want!?” The man pleaded. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

“You have until tomorrow to give it back.” The figure placed a boot between the man’s shoulders and shoved him forward—as he passed through the construct, it dissolved into vapor. “I suggest you get on it.” The boy stumbled forward and bolted past Ian, gasping with fear. Ian looked over and saw the hooded figure still there, watching him. “You came,” she said.

“What the fuck was that!?” Ian sputtered. “Who the fuck—Jesus, lady, what is your problem!?”

“I saw you earlier,” the figure said, walking closer. “This morning. At the quad.”

“Was that you too?” Ian asked, taking one step backwards for every step she took forward. “How long have you been watching me?”

“For a while. Since I got here. I thought I recognized you, but it wasn’t until i saw you in action today that I knew it. You’re him. The Getup Noise.”

Ian felt his breath snare in his lungs. “No. No, I’m not. You’ve got the wrong person.”

“I don’t. I know it. I know who you are.”

“What the hell is the big idea here, huh? What, you think you know who I am, so you lure me to a secluded spot? Are you going to throw one of those nightmare things at me, too? What, have you got some kind of unresolved beef with the Vanguard, or something!? Who the hell are you!?”

Slowly, the figure reached up and took off her hood, and then tugged her scarf down. She was a young woman—certainly Ian’s age, maybe a student. She was ghostly pale, her hair was blue and loosely braided over her shoulder, and her eyes were heavily rimmed with kohl. In the ambient light, they looked almost red.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’m not here because I want to fight you. I want you to help me.”

 


	2. 2 - I Don't Belong Here

“No!” Ian shouted, his voice thin and angry. “No, I am not going to help you! What in god’s name is your problem!? You almost made a kid wet his pants in front of me! I’m calling the cops!”

The girl standing in front of Ian went pale. “W-wait, no, hold on a minute,” she pleaded, holding up her hands. “You don’t—you don’t need to call the cops. I didn’t hurt anybody.”

“What if that kid had a heart condition!?” Ian demanded. “You could have killed him! You can’t just terrorize people on campus and expect anybody to be okay with it! What is your damage!?”

“I didn’t—” The girl looked panicked. “No, wait. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. You’re The Getup Noise, right?”

“For the last time, my name is Ian Hanert! And if you knew anything about me, you’d know that I was a superhero, not a villain!”

“I’m—” The girl stopped, hurt plainly visible on her face. “I’m not a villain.”

“Not a villain!? You just shook a guy down for a laptop in front of me!”

“He stole it.”

“Does that give you any reason to jump him in a gulley? Call the cops!”

“We… She did. The girl he stole it from. Listen, a girl who lives in one of the quads got in touch with me last week. She knew that her roommate’s boyfriend stole her laptop, but campus PD didn’t do anything about it. She had everything on that laptop. Her whole life. So she called me and asked me to help. Look, that guy’s on the lacrosse team. He helped take us the Eastern Conference last year. Nobody was going to hold him accountable.”

“She called you?” Ian raised his eyebrows. “How many people on campus know about you?”

“Enough.” She shrugged weakly. “It’s a whisper network, right? If you need to know, you know.”

“And who knows? Because this is the first time I’m hearing about it.”

“Girls.” She smiled. “Girls who… maybe someone hurt them, or stole from them, or tried taking advantage of them somehow, and nobody would help them make it right. They call me.”

“And what do they call you?”

“Boggart. Maybe I should have lead with that first.” She extended a hand. “Can I explain the rest of it to you if I buy you some fries?”

 

“So basically, I’m a mind reader.” Boggart was sitting opposite Ian in a vinyl booth in a Lenny’s, her mask tucked in her pocket and her hood down around her shoulders. In the harsh light of the diner, she looked surprisingly normal; maybe even pretty. Her hair was a bright blue color that implied it had been freshly dyed, and her black nail polish was beginning to chip. She had a lot of scabs around her cuticles that told Ian she bit her fingers frequently. Her eyes had a curious light beneath them, a feeling that she was always watching her surroundings. She was small, but she had the unmistakable sense of a lion at rest. “I can manifest people’s greatest fears in the form of constructs, and I can control those constructs.”

“How do you know what people are afraid of?”

“Oh, I don’t.” Boggart’s tone was awfully breezy for someone who could conjure bespoke nightmares, Ian thought. “I can just pull whatever it is out of their heads and give it a physical shape. They decide what they’re scared of. I just make it real.”

“How?”

“I just focus on them for a little while. I imagine what my constructs are made of—I like imagining it’s snow falling down on an invisible thing—and then I let them start moving. When I don’t need them anymore, I just stop focusing and they turn back to dust. They can’t actually hurt anything, though. They’re immaterial.”

“So how’d you get your powers?”

“I don’t know.” Boggart shrugged and continued to poke around the plate of fries in front of her. She found a fry that met her standards, and popped it in her mouth. “My mom moved a lot of furniture before she knew she was pregnant with me. She thinks maybe that did it.”

“So they know?”

“Hard not to. My dad came to check on me one night when I was asleep, and he saw me lying dead in bed. It was a construct, y’know—I was lying right there, but I’d projected this image on top of myself without knowing. I don’t think he ever fully recovered.”

Ian leveled what he hoped was a very blank stare at Boggart, his fingertips resting on his mug of coffee. “Who else knows?”

“Couple specialists, back home. My best friend, back when I was on my gymnastics team. That’s basically it. They didn’t really want me talking about it.”

“But you learned to control it?”

“Well, that’s why they sent me to those specialists; my parents wanted me to learn how to shut it off. They weren’t monsters, y’know, they didn’t want lobotomize me or anything like that. They just wanted me to be able to stop it. But, I mean…” She shrugged. “I figured out pretty fast how to switch it on and off. Like I said, it’s not like they can hurt anyone; they’re incorporeal. But they don’t really need to be corporal to do damage. You get me?”

“Do your parents know that you’re doing…” Ian gestured helplessly. “This?”

“Nope.” Boggart shook her head. “Nobody does. I only started doing this last year, though. And just when I started out, somebody took a video of me stopping a purse snatcher, and it went viral. That’s when I figured I had to make an earnest run of it. I’m way more careful now. No more daytime runs. I operate at night, and I keep my face hidden. I saved up and bought some specialized gear too, so now I’m legit.”

“Legit,” Ian replied weakly. “So, why do you want me to help you?”

“Well, you were a superhero, right? Like, a real superhero. I remember the broadcasts, the falling buildings, the…” She pantomimed punching. “And you were, like, the coolest one. You were a hero! I can’t believe you’re even at this stupid school! You could have probably, like, done anything! The opportunity was too good; I couldn’t not ask you for help.”

“Well, I wanted to—I’m sorry, did you say, ‘the coolest one’?”

“Well, yeah. Duh. A DJ who has noise powers? And he uses them to fight crime? It was, like, the coolest thing. I couldn’t even believe it when I first saw you.”

She thought he was cool? “Why not, I don’t know, join the archery club or something?”

“Because the stupid campus PD won’t do jack about actual crimes!” Boggart waved her hands. “They’re a bunch of useless rent-a-cops who don’t want to actually punish anyone. The campus judiciary is useless. Community Standards is useless. Someone’s got to help people who need it.”

“And… look, Boggart, I get it. I really do. But what you’re doing is basically waging an extrajudicial campaign of terror on campus, and you’re asking me to help.”

“Well—I don’t want to be doing that. Look. I don’t like doing what I’m doing. But when you talk about me scaring people, are you asking yourself which people? Because the only people I’ve seen running scared are idiots who try to slip roofies in drinks at the bar. The girls on campus aren’t scared. The guys who don’t try to steal people’s things aren’t scared. Come on, you were, like, teen delinquent numero uno. You get it, right?”

“Sure. I was teen delinquent numero uno. I’m not doing that crap anymore. So, thanks for the fries,” Ian rose from the booth, “but I’m going to go. I won’t call the cops if I don’t see you doing this anymore.”

“Wait! Wait! No!” Boggart scrambled to her feet and grabbed Ian’s sleeve. “I’m sorry. You can’t go.”

“I sure can,” Ian shot back. “Let go of me.”

“No. Look. I didn’t search you out because I want your help catching creeps who are yelling stuff at girls from their cars, or stealing from dorms. There’s something else. Something worse.” She looked desperate. “Will you please just hear me out?”

Ian paused, considered it, and then sat back down. She thought he was cool. “You have two minutes.”

“Okay. Look.” Boggart pulled out her phone. “A couple weeks back, me and a few girls started getting threatening emails sent to us. Someone telling us that we’d pay for what we’ve done. Campus PD can’t figure out who sent the emails, and then a few days ago, someone carved a message into one of the girl’s doors.” She held up her phone, and showed Ian a picture of a wooden door with several unwholesome words carved into them. The gashes were deep. Ian considered the picture.

“Is there any security footage?”

“The cameras caught someone dressed all in black with a mask on their face, but there’s no record of anyone entering or leaving the building. Everyone on that floor got a stern talking-to about propping the doors open, and that was it.”

“And you want to…?”

“Catch whoever it is! Duh! If the cops can’t figure it out, I will!”

“Okay, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, simmer down. So you’re on some vendetta to catch whoever this is. Why do you need me to do it?”

“Because I need help. I need someone to watch my back, and you’re the only one on campus who gets it.”

“Gets what, exactly?”

“Having powers. Using them for good. You ran with the Vanguard, man, there must be something you know about this stuff that I don’t. And… if there’s some maniac with a knife out there threatening people, I’d maybe like to have someone watching my back.”

“Okay, first of all: I’m out of the superheroing business, and I was never really good at it to begin with. Secondly, I wasn’t the knife-fight guy on the team, so you’re out of luck there too. Third: what are you going to do when you catch this guy?”

Boggart opened her mouth to speak, paused, and then furrowed her brow. “Well, I hadn’t really thought of that. Bring him to the cops, I guess?”

“Before or after he jams a knife into your ribs? Because those marks on the door are deep, and that’s solid wood. I can tell you that skin breaks a lot easier than that.”

“I don’t care. I’ve got to do something. These girls reached out to me; I have a job. I can’t betray their trust like that.”

“Why are they going to you in the first place? You’re a student, just like them.”

“Because I’m the only one who’s willing to actually do something, even if it means I have to bend the rules a little bit. I’m not hurting anyone. But I have these abilities, and it’s pointless if I don’t use them to help people. It’s worse than pointless. It’s immoral.”

And then: Paige, standing there in the rubble, dust caked in the blood on her forehead. “I had to,” she’d said softly to herself. “What’s the point of my powers if I can’t even protect the people I love?”

“So what’s your plan?” Ian asked.

“Sorry?”

“Your plan. For catching this guy, I mean. Where are you going to go from here?”

Boggart’s face broke into a smile. “Does this mean you’ll help?”

“It means I’m thinking of helping. But as Ian Hanert, okay? I’m not The Getup Noise anymore. It’s just Ian.”

“Well, just Ian, I was thinking I’d go ask some questions and see if the victims have any people in common,” Boggart said, a little smile on her face. “How does that sound?”

“Not bad,” Ian replied. “And, um, I’m meeting up with some friends tomorrow. Maybe I can ask for their input, too.”

 

Driving was another item on the lengthy list of things that Ian did not do. He hadn’t done much of it in his teens – he’d had a family who had people who did the driving for them, and following that, he’d lived in a city with a blessedly robust public transit system. He lived down the road from his college, and the town had just about everything he needed. Why bother driving? There was no reason – unless, of course, one of your former superpowered cohorts invited you to a dinner forty minutes out of town that you suddenly had a very strong urge to attend. Then, you might curse not having a car.

It was a taxi, a bus, and then a mile walk to Paige’s address. She lived just on the outer boundary of Waterloo, and as Ian trudged closer to his final destination, grocery store cupcakes in hand, he felt his heart begin to flutter in his chest. He couldn’t articulate why he felt nervous, but he knew well enough that he was getting anxious about the reunion. He was circling back to a period of his life that he had closed the door on, and he felt a sudden overwhelming fear that if he got too close, it would reach out and yank him back in.

His thoughts drifted to the piano in the rehearsal hall at school, and he quickly stuffed those away, too.

Paige lived in a second-story walkup that overlooked the main drag, and Ian could tell which unit was hers from the garland and lights hanging in the big windows, even before Thanksgiving. Paige loved Christmas more than any of the holidays, and from what little time Ian had spent on social media, he could tell that she was overjoyed at having a space to decorate for every upcoming holiday known to man, up to and including Leif Erikson Day.

Each step that Ian took up the stairs to the second floor of the brownstone filled his stomach with a bit more lead. He hated it, hated the heaviness in his gut and the lightness in his fingers that signaled that he was verging on panic, and he hated that he knew that it made no sense. Why was he panicking? Because he’d have to see Windswept again? Or Diana? Why was he freaking out?

He remembered the lights blinking in the warehouse—illusions that Pippa had conjured for the crowd of people assembled. He remembered standing over his kit as the crowd moved in time to the deep thrum of bass. And then he blinked, and he was standing in front of Paige’s door, a dent forming in the plastic clamshell of the cupcakes from where he was gripping it too tight. He was staring at a wreath with a small felted banner that said “Welcome!” He was standing around like a weirdo. Self-consciousness set in, and he raised his hand to knock. Before he ever got the chance, the door swung open, and he got a half-second glimpse of Paige before he was knocked back and lifted off his feet in a hug.

“Ian! I missed you!” His arms and legs jangled around like dog toys as he was shook to and fro by the smaller girl. “I missed you so much!”

“Paige! What did I tell you about lifting other people up without permission?” Ian saw Diana slide off of a stool and approach the door. “Kid, put him down and let him breathe.”

“I’m sorry!” Ian was immediately returned to his feet and he watched Paige back away shyly, her hands raised in apology. “Sorry.”

“C’mon in,” Diana added, gently scooting Paige out of the door by the back of her collar. “You must have had a long drive. Dinner’s not quite ready yet, but we’ve got snacks.”

“Are those cupcakes?” Paige asked.

“Yeah. Uh, here.” Ian awkwardly pushed the box into her hands. “Housewarming gift. They’re strawberry.”

Paige’s face bloomed into one of sentimental gratitude. “Thank you, Ian.”

“Don’t mention it.” Ian shrugged off his coat and walked into the apartment in a way that he hoped didn’t look meek. It was beautiful – the kitchen and living room were one large room, divided halfway by a bar, and the windows stretched from the floor to the ceiling. There was a balcony outside, too. “The place is nice, Paige.” It was beautiful.

“Yeah! I’ll give you the grand tour: there’s the kitchen, this is the living room, and the bathroom is the second door on the right. And there’s Anai. Ta dah!” She smiled wide, and for the first time, Ian was able to get a good look at her. The last time he had actually seen Paige, she was a gawky fifteen year-old with bushy red hair and buck teeth. Somehow, she was still that freckled teenager, but there was the unmistakable air of maturation around her. Standing there in her garish holiday sweater, with her big ears and thick eyebrows, her shoulders unconsciously squared and her eyes warm and confident, he could see that she was becoming the person she was meant to be.

She looked like a hero.

Ian was so lost in the sudden uprising of emotion that this provoked that he didn’t even notice the presence behind him until he saw Diana’s gaze flicker past him. He realized who it should have been before he heard her voice, but when she spoke, he still felt his stomach go cold.

“Hi, Ian.”

When he turned around, he was looking at Windswept.

He felt the air congeal around him, felt his hands begin to tremble under his coat. There was something on her face, some expression he couldn’t place—was it sadness? Affection? Anger? Why had he agreed to this, when he’d known she was going to be here? Why was looking at his old mentor causing him to freeze so badly? He suddenly felt a glut of anger in his throat, rising as he realized that he was surrounded by so many questions he couldn’t answer and feelings he couldn’t place, and that he hated every single bit of it. And then, he felt a strong hand on his shoulder, pulling him from his reverie, and Windswept’s face returned to normal.

“Let me take your coat,” Diana said gently, steering him towards the kitchen. “And why don’t you sit down and have something to eat? You look like you’re hungry. Babe,” Diana called back to Windswept, “how long until dinner?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Windswept responded, her fingers brushing Diana’s shoulders as she passed her. “And stop calling me that.”

“But you hate it so much,” Diana replied, a mischievous grin on her face. “Ian, can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Wine?”

“Don’t offer him wine!” Windswept snapped, to which Diana rolled her eyes.

“Christ alive, T, he’s a senior in college,” Diana shot back. “He can sit at the big kids’ table.”

“Coffee would be great,” Ian interjected meekly. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

He hadn’t even noticed, but Anai was sitting at the far end of the bar, and she raised a hand in greeting as Diana sat him down. She was in the spot that offered her the best view of the entire apartment, and he didn’t think she’d done that unconsciously. If oncoming adulthood was turning Paige into a heroic paragon, it was making Anai even more intimidating. When Paige sat next to her and Anai draped a protective arm around her shoulder, he noticed that her knuckles were sporting crisscrossed white scars. He didn’t want to think about the condition of whoever had been on the receiving end of those.

“Ian, tell me everything!” Paige said, leaning forward. “I want to hear all of it.”

“There’s… not much to tell, really.” Ian reached forward to one of the crackers on the tray in front of him, and realized how desperately hungry he was. “I’m almost done at school, I have a little place not too far from campus, and that’s about it.”

“What are you studying?”

“Um.” Ian internally winced, because he knew what was coming. “Music theory.”

“Theory! Are you writing music again?” Paige looked delighted, which was what Ian had been afraid of.

“Not really, no.” He shook his head. “Just studying it. You know, how it works?”

“Well, it’s certainly in your wheelhouse, right?” Diana had taken a spot opposite him, a glass of red wine in front of her. Behind her, Windswept was making a big show of filling the coffeemaker. “You have a good ear for it. You doing anything outside of class?”

“No… I mean, it’s a lot of studying. I spend a lot of time in the library.” He watched a little smirk form on Diana’s face. He felt his face grow hot. Was it funny to her, him in the library? “I walk around the neighborhood a lot. I’m sorry. It’s—” He felt suddenly, desperately trapped. “What have you been doing?”

“Oh! Lots. Look!” Paige pulled her phone out of her pocket and began scrolling through it. “I’m still doing classes full time, but Diana’s taking me on patrol with her on the weekends when I come home. I’m officially a sidekick, now.” She held up her phone to show Ian a selfie she’d taken in costume of Flashpoint standing in front of a heap of crumpled villains. “I’m going to be on their new team.”

“With good behavior,” Diana interjected. “Which means not telling anybody about the team before the announcement’s made. C’mon, you know you’re not supposed to talk about that.”

“It’s just Ian! He’s not going to tell anyone.” Paige tucked her phone in her pocket. “Anyway, you guys are making the announcement next year, so why not tell him? He deserves to know.”

“Because there are forms and grants and piles of paperwork that you aren’t involved with filling out!” Windswept chimed in from the kitchen, finally incapable of holding her tongue. “It’s not all new armor and press conferences, it’s red tape and police cooperation and don’t even get me started on Aegis, because Colonel Tanner has been nothing but—”

“Anyway,” Paige continued as Windswept groused in the background, “I want to name the new team V-Force.”

“We’re not naming it V-Force,” Diana said.

“Why not?”

“Because it makes it sound like we’re a bunch of virgins.”

Paige flushed. “And what’s wrong with that!?”

“Nothing, if you’re not in your mid-thirties.”

“Are you two talking about what we’re naming the team again!?” Windswept demanded, zipping over to Diana. As she tapped one finger against Diana’s collarbone, she slid a mug of coffee over to Ian with her other hand. “You know we’re not even technically approved, and there are only a hundred things we need to clear before we can even start considering a team name?”

“What if I tell you I’m sorry?” Diana said, sticking her lower lip out.

“What if you tell me you’re sorry by helping me with dinner?” Windswept laced an arm around Diana’s waist and pulled her off of her chair, towards the oven. Diana looked back at Ian and shrugged, as if to say, you know what it’s like with her. The problem was, he didn’t. This side of Windswept—still laser-focused, still chiding Diana and Paige, was somehow different. There had been some kind of internal shift in her, some mask that had slipped, that left him unsure of who she was. It was there as she and Diana spoke, that softness in her face as Diana hauled a large covered pan from the stove and placed a hand on the small of her back as she scooted around her to grab something, a half-smile on her face that was so new, but still so recognizable. She was the same, but so different. Who was she now?

Halcyon General Hospital Trauma Ward, four years ago. Diana, unconscious in a hospital bed, her body held together with stitches, screws, and plaster. Paige, herself stitched and bandaged, asleep on the couch in the room. Windswept, asleep on a chair beside the bed, her fingers interlaced with Diana’s. He had just stopped in to drop off a card, but he’d felt the overpowering sense that he was intruding on something deeply private.

“Ian? Ian?” Ian shook himself from his reverie and saw Paige leaning forward, curiousness on her face. “Earth to Ian. Can you read me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.” He took a swig of coffee. “Sorry. What’d you say?”

“I asked what else was new. C’mon, it’s been four years. There has to have been something you did.”

“Well,” Ian looked up and made sure that Diana and Windswept were occupied. Diana was evidently browning the top of the lasagna by setting it on fire, and Windswept was engaged in some extremely high-speed fretting over it. “Look, I need to ask you something. It’s about a girl.”

Paige immediately choked on her tea. “A girl!?” She sputtered. Anai dutifully patted her on the back.

“Keep your voice down,” Ian hissed. “It’s not like that. It—she—she has powers. Like us.”

“Powers?” Paige’s eyes were like saucers. “Like… what kind of powers?”

“Constructs, Paige. She can… She has the ability to create constructs based on people’s fears. And she’s… she’s really effective at it.” Ian dug out his phone and pulled up a photo someone on campus had taken of the clown, and slid it over to Paige. She grimaced. “Really effective.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Me. And now you. That’s about it. Paige, I don’t know what to do. She knows who I am. She followed me, tracked me down, and she wants me to help her.”

“Help her?” Paige’s eyes almost bugged out of her head. “You? I’m sorry, but—you?”

“You don’t have to apologize, that’s what I thought too.” Ian shrugged helplessly. “Paige, she’s already active around campus. She has a plan, and she’s going to go through with it regardless of if I say yes or no.”

“What’s she doing?”

“All the girls on campus evidently know her. She—if something happens, they call her, and she tries to sort it out under the table.”

“By scaring people?”

“It’s not a great scene, Paige. And she told me that it looks like someone’s actively threatening her and a bunch of girls on campus, and she’s determined to catch whoever it is. You know right from wrong here; you’re probably the only person I trust who does. What do I do?”

“You kids hungry?” Diana called from the kitchen. “We’ve got more lasagna over here than I know what to do with, so you’d better be ready to eat!”

“We’ll talk later,” Paige whispered, and then hopped off of her stool. “Diana, you’d better cut me a big corner slice!”

Dinner was not as catastrophic as Ian had feared; Paige happily dominated the conversation, chatting easily about college (people recognized her! Classes were challenging! She was in the trivia club!) and happily bouncing questions off of Ian about his neck of the woods and what his college was like. Ian was happy to focus on that, given that Diana and Windswept were interacting with each other with an easy physicality that felt weird to watch. He was used to seeing Windswept buttoned-up and miserable, not casually flirting with her girlfriend over a meal they’d prepared together. And yet—and yet, every once in a while he would catch a furtive glance from her, a worry in her eye. Or was it something else? It was a feeling he knew, but couldn’t name.

After dinner, Paige and Anai cleared the plates and bickered over washing the dishes before Windswept intervened and assigned them to try and store the plates, which she would wash. It gave Ian a chance to escape to the balcony and take a breath of night air. Soon, this would be over, and he could escape back to his apartment and Shrimp. But after a few moments of quiet, he was disturbed by the sound of the door sliding open.

“Hey.” It was Diana, her expression unreadable. “Mind if I join you?”

What was he going to say? “Sure,” Ian shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, and Diana gently slid the door shut behind her, and leaned on the balcony railing next to him. They stood in silence for a moment, before Diana spoke.

“She misses you, you know. Windswept.”

Ian had somehow known this was coming, but it didn’t stop him from sighing heavily. “Does she?”

“Sure. She just doesn’t know how to say it. That’s always been her problem, right? It took her a year and half after we started dating to say that she loved me.” Diana reached into her jacket, and withdrew a box of cigarettes. “Don’t ask me for one,” she said as she lit up.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good kid.” Diana took a deep inhale and flicked the ash off the railing, where it trailed down like snowflakes. “She’s going to read me the riot act, but whatever. Special occasion.”

“Yeah, Paige told me you were trying to quit.”

“Still am. Always will be, probably.” She shrugged. “I know it’s probably a lot for you, being back here. I didn’t mean to pressure you, it’s just… Paige wanted to see you. So did T.” Her pet name for Windswept. God, she had a pet name. “She’s been mentioning you a bit. Asking Paige if she’d been keeping tabs on you. I thought it might do some good.”

“If she cares so much, why hasn’t she even talked to me tonight?”

“She cares, Ian. She’s just got a funny way of showing it. I think she was so used to being good at everything when she was younger that when she got older and realized there were things she couldn’t do, she ran up against a wall. It’s who she is.” Diana took a drag off of her cigarette. “That’s one of the perks of being a fuck-up, I guess. Nobody ever told me I was perfect at anything.”

Ian shrugged. “Why does she care at all?”

“You’d have to get this from her if you want a direct answer, but you were still her student, you know. I know she used to wave the Quiet Room at you and yell a lot, but it was because she had no other way of telling you that she knew you could be better. Nobody taught her how to be vulnerable. They usually try to steer you away from that in the superheroing business.”

“You think she’ll ever learn?”

Diana scoffed. “If she ever does, I’ll let you know.”

Ian weighed his options for a moment as Diana stood there in respectful quiet, and finally decided how he wanted to frame his next question. “Diana, what was it like when she decided to take me on as a student?”

Diana looked taken aback. “Sorry?”

“Like, why’d she make the decision to help me? I could have just gone to juvie, and she could have avoided the headache.”

Diana shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. She saw talent and capability in you, and she thought we could use it instead of just wasting it. She saw that you had a good heart; you were just a little misguided. Mind you, she’ll never admit it. She’s a tough nut to crack, Ian, and I’ll be the first one to admit that, but deep down, she does care. We all do. You’re one of ours, even if you hung up your hat on the whole Young Vanguard fiasco. The powers come second, kid. The thing that matters most is you have a good heart. It’s what made us all know you could be more than what you were.”

And then, the sliding door was opened with a deafening thud, and Windswept thrust her head outside. “Are you smoking out here!?”

“No,” Diana said, the lit cigarette plainly visible in her right hand.

Windswept darted over to her in the blink of an eye and plucked the cigarette from Diana’s fingers and ground it out on the railing. “It’s disgusting, and you know it. Now, come inside. We have dessert ready. Ian, are you…” Windswept looked over at him, and he saw that same expression that he couldn’t place on her face. “Are you joining us?”

“Yeah.” Ian forced a smile as Windswept hauled Diana inside, the other woman shrugging helplessly.

Inside, Paige had quartered the cupcakes Ian had given her, and arranged them around scoops of ice cream. She was positively beaming with pride, which was maybe a bit misplaced given that she was using discount cupcakes from the supermarket, but Ian did his best to eat and smile and compliment her. And then, finally, it was time for him to put his coat back on and go. Anai gave him a nod of the head as a way of saying goodbye, and Paige once again pulled him into a tight hug.

“Call me, okay?” She whispered to him. “About what we talked about.”

Ian nodded, stepped away, and involuntarily looked at Windswept as she approached him.

“It was good to see you,” she said softly. “I’m glad you came.”

“Thanks.”

“I know you’re probably busy, but if you have the chance, come out and see us again. We all want to know how you’re doing.”

“I’m doing fine,” Ian lied. “It was good seeing you too, Windswept.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Diana said, “but I called a car to take you back to your place. We’ve got all this Vanguard money, so I figure we’d use it. Plus, I don’t want to put you back on the bus with the leftovers.” She handed him two large plastic containers full of lasagna, which had a note taped to the top lid. “Check in with us, okay? Hopefully it won’t be another four years before we see you again.”

“Will do. Thanks again, Diana.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Ian felt like he should have experienced a surge of trepidation at the prospect of getting into a Vanguard-issued car and taking it back to where he lived, but he was so exhausted from the evening that he could barely even care that he was going home to begin with. The ride was shorter than he expected, and smoother, and there was no driver to make awkward small talk with. He was deposited at his front door, and he could barely remember walking up the stairs, locking his door behind him, and scratching Shrimp behind the ears. It was only when he stooped to put his leftover in his barren fridge that he had a flash of cognition. There was a note taped to the top. What was it?

He gently plucked the paper off of the lid and unfolded it. On it was a short message: only four words, written in Diana’s unmistakable handwriting.

“She’s proud of you.”

A dam broke. Ian shoved the paper into his pocket and crawled, still fully-clothed, into his bed, and cried.


End file.
